


Beholden to Nothing and Nobody

by lapsi



Category: Mindhunter (TV 2017)
Genre: Attempted Rape/Non-Con, Holden Ford at his fucked up narcissistic worst, Homophobic Language, M/M, Mania, Mentions of Murder, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Period-Typical Homophobia, Serial Killer Fanboy Holden Ford
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-13
Updated: 2018-09-13
Packaged: 2019-07-11 21:29:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15980873
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lapsi/pseuds/lapsi
Summary: Holden Ford's proposed sting to catch a serial killer, murdering male prostitutes, requires bait.Ideally, a bright, appealing young male, who knows the case inside out, who is already experienced in undercover operations.Ideally, Holden Ford himself.





	Beholden to Nothing and Nobody

**Author's Note:**

> This story is a big departure from my other works in terms of my interpretation of Holden Ford. This Holden is very creepy, narcissistic, callous. In other words, a bad person, in a very dark piece of fiction.
> 
> Fic concept 100% plagiarized from [robokittens](http://archiveofourown.org/users/robokittens) and [reserve](http://archiveofourown.org/users/reserve)!!!! If you sue me I'd deserve it.
> 
> Please check the tags and make sure this isn't going to bother you before you read it!

 

“Holden, you’re high,” you say to me, managing to make the statement of obvious fact accusatory. Intimating, intimidating.  
  
Intimate, I think. I realize my hand is on your forearm and I peel away. Like a tarp peeled off the waterlogged corpse of Joseph Miller, aka Jo Sweet, mixologist at the Flamingo Bar, two weeks ago. I should be the body. Not the tarp.  
  
I could have been a body, courtesy of Bernard Bolt. I have his name, now. It was the first thing I did, when they wrenched me off the kitchen where I had my lips spread open on what might have been tracked in dirt or dried blood or maybe dog shit. I had my hands spread out wide hi-fives when they kicked the door in. That’s how to be a good hostage when the SWAT team arrives. Get down and stay down.  
  
I’d found a power bill on his fridge and read his full name. He’d said ‘Benny’ to Christopher Winters, a twenty-four year old male prostitute who’d been headstrong enough to open the car door and graze himself over the gray of a crowded sidewalk. He hadn’t talked to the police. He’d talked to me. Told me about Benny. _Bernie._  
  
Bernard Bolt. Bernie Bolt. A cartoonish name for an anatomically correct man. A hot-blooded brute. Minisculely textured roughness and masculinity oozing from the homosexual homophobic language. His dick. His dick against the jeans covering my thigh when he pushed me back on a kitchen bench and I’d spilled the last few fluid ounces of beer in my still-sober surprise. A security guard, I think. Maybe at the Flamingo Bar? Maybe a hospital, to get the drugs he used to keep them under control. There was a dark uniform hanging in Bernie’s bedroom, I’d nearly been close enough to figure out how the slackened fabric fit into place. But you’d almost wrenched my shoulder nearly out of its socket dragging me away. Away from my investigation of 'Benny''s bedroom. Away from the local boys all staring at me like they’d never seen an FBI agent before. Into the passenger side door, slamming it after me. Like I’d done something wrong, when I’d done everything right.  
  
“He would have been suspicious if I didn’t drink the beer,” I say, infallible logic against your predictable, Bill Tench, stick-in-the-mud morality. I knew you’d be mired in the excruciating detail. So set on the imagined spick-and-span sting. The world is elastic, Bill. Dirty, elastic. Like my briefs when he tried to get my jeans off. Nothing will ever be as upright and rigid as you want it to be.  
  
As if I’m broadcasting a critique of your German-ly orderly Weltanschauung, you scowl. Become that criss-cross of intersecting scored lines that prematurely age you. Your entire life prematurely ages you. Your face is a Midwest highway map you toss into my side of the hire car, when you bitch at me to stop staring into space, and start actively navigating. Is there a map in this car?  
  
“You could have pretended to drink it. ... _fuck_ , Holden, look at me.”

Can’t hear my thoughts. Or else you wouldn’t be in an enclosed space with me. “I doubt he’d suddenly start changing up dosages. So it’s absolutely non-lethal. Slight physical and mental impairments, but he was planning on using his significant height and weight advantage to overpower me. He wasn’t going to risk killing me before he could have any fun.”  
  
“You could try to sound less excited by the prospect,” you say condescendingly. _Did_ I sound excited? And then: “Why didn’t you leave. When he tried to-- Holden, you didn’t have to--”  
  
“Don’t tell me you’ve never got your hands dirty in the service of our great nation.”  
  
“It wasn’t your _hands_ you got dirty.” You tap out a cigarette singular and discrete and manageable. Your distraction. You always wants a distraction from the cases.  
  
You could be so brilliant. If you didn’t smoke, if instead you gave crime scenes your undivided attention like you can never bear to. If you spent less time with your family. If you didn’t need a gauze over your eyes before you could turn them towards a terrible thing like a dead body or an inhuman coworker.  
  
“I was watching,” you add, grim. I’m supposed to flush with shame. A schoolgirl caught beneath the bleachers. “We had eyes on you, Holden. Through the kitchen window. We were staking it out. To try to get you the fuck out of there.’  
  
Maybe you’re hoping I’ll show you shame. You want me to perform something for you, Bill. Something traumatized and prostrated. Maybe you want me to be angry that you didn't come sooner.  
  
I can taste him in my mouth. Fleshy like undercooked chicken, similarly unpalatable. Biological warning signals, or perhaps conditioned associations. I can feel the cut of his tongue in the the interior of my skull and I’m hard as I lean forward. “I _bet_ you were watching.”  
  
“Holden, you’re high,” you say again, an excuse on my behalf. Like the starched collar is clerical and you’re pardoning me for my many, many sins.  
  
“His car’s roped off,” I diffuse, pointing. “Staked that out too, finally?”  
  
“They found garbage bags, tools that could be used for dismemberment. Wanted to ask me about the saw marks on the bones. Why I was so slow making it in. Someone stopped me to ask about some fucking bonesaw they found in his car trunk. I was trying to get to you out of there,” you insist, and I hear guilt.   
  
I back off just enough that you don’t repeat that I’m high, _again_. “Always the trunk of their car. It’s like the serial killer confessional booth. Some part of them wants to be caught. Aiko Koo in Ed’s trunk when he went to his last psych appointment before he got cleared. Do you think that’s subconscious self-destructive drives, or just narcissistic cockiness?”  
  
I notice a scar on your knuckle as you turn the car keys with too much force and wonder if that was a field injury, or clumsiness with a powertool or a kitchen knife.  
  
“...how’s your pulse?” you ask, as if you couldn’t reach over and take my pulse. You could take anything you wanted from me in this state. “I could drive you to hospital, but you’re that fucking talkative right now you could blow this entire case before they even mirandize the guy.”  
  
They read him his Miranda Rights already. Were you that distracted by me that you didn’t notice? “I don’t need to go the hospital,” I insist. I find I’m grinding my molars. I pull down the sun visor to see if there’s a mirror and find only a hire car brochure in a clear plastic pocket. I have to slide over and raise my chin to look in the rear view, at a bad angle, too close to the other occupant. You don’t back off.  
  
My pupils are dilated wide and I find myself handsome and defiled.  
  
We’d kicked another girl, and a young man, off the strip that Winters had been walking. The first two men that tried to pick me up drove cars that weren’t white Dodge Aspens, but I’d got in. And been met with a bearded, short-statured businessman, and then a plain-looking black man with a cleft palate lisp telling me I looked real sweet tonight and that he didn't think he'd seen me round here before. There'd been red and blue flashing through the rear window and the breathless crying and begging not to ruin their lives. I don’t think any charges were pressed on the disappointments. Not our six foot three or four inch tall, broad-shouldered and meaty, salt and pepper hair, caucasian, 'Benny'. It was a Sunday and he’d abducted them all on Sunday night. I thought maybe he was letting me down gently. And then a white Dodge Aspen had pulled to the curb and I'd caught myself jogging to get inside.  
  
I can see the abrasion of his stubble over my top lip. The lip is swollen, chapped into white strips. I lick it and taste the beer I’d drunk in his kitchen before I was supposed to blow him for fifteen dollars, which is apparently the going rate for oral sex in this part of Philadelphia. Fifteen dollars for all _this_ . Perhaps the other men had suspected he’d agree to more costly exercises, once there was a bedroom available.  
  
I tug at the collar of the floral shirt to see if he sucked any bruises into place.  
  
You are almost hysterical: “You can sleep this off and--”  
  
“I’m hungry,” I say, but I’m not. But if we go to a diner, now, at eight something in the evening, you’ll order a double pour of bourbon on rehearsed instinct. And you’ll down it. You never say ‘no’ to a drink. And you’ll loosen up and unwind and talk about the case with me. _Pull yourself together, Bill._ Everything went to script, unfolded off the page like pure tragedy. The kitchen could have been The Rose Theater as Bernie’s fatal flaw was revealed: nubile men walking West Philadelphia. Warn a million men away from their own alike vices. And the crowd would have thrown bouquets at our feet as we exited the stage, him to Philly PD, me into Bill’s custody.  
  
Bernard, Bernie, had called me a whore and one of the local PD had hit him on the side of the head hard enough that he fell into his own refrigerator. Someone to defend my honor before Bill even stepped foot into that kitchen. It had been that same, kind man who picked me up and said ‘easy, easy, easy’ like I was a cleft deer in a fender. And he’d said, we lost you there for a second, Ford. Fast driver, huh? He’d had big brown eyes that avoided me even though I was right smack bang in front of him. Not like all the other local cops rubbernecking their way into the crime scene. Probably thinking I was a fucking queer because I did my fucking job. The policeman helping me to my feet wasn’t on the murder investigation, but he’d been coordinating the sting. I’d only met him once, when I’d been in my suit pitching the plan as some perfectly routine operation. He’d wanted to get some kid they’d pulled in on solicitation to do it. Some strung out rent-boy, who'd freak out and blow the whole thing. What was the cop’s name? Anders? No, that was one of the witnesses. A--… A--… Addison? No. That was a murder victim over in Ohio last month.  
  
“Holden, are you with me?” you squeeze out, barely pulmonary. I'm back in the passenger seat. I feel the weak breath from the syllables and it touches my cheek like he’d touched my cheek with the back of his hand when I first slid over his car’s leather bench seat.  
  
You don’t seem to relish the proximity like Bernie did.  
  
“Did you hear me, kid? What do you want to eat?”  
  
No. I didn’t hear you. I didn’t want to hear you: I haven’t decided what lie to tell or how to sell it. The mere mention of food is gut-turning to me. I don’t think I could muster faux enthusiasm for a steak dinner. “What was the name of that local cop? The one who arrested him. He has brown eyes,” I ask, squinting through the windshield. The squad car with Bernie is long gone, but the house is swathed in crime scene tape and jumping out at me with each flashbulb documentation occurring within. You should be in there, but instead you’re on the out with me.  
  
“What? Is that important?” you say, and you’re reaching over to button up my shirt. You hated the shirt the moment Christopher Winters had handed it over. He’d been so happy anyone cared about someone murdering faggots. Helping out my proposed sting by costuming me up like I was a faggot too. I don’t own any shirts like this, but maybe I should, because it looks good on me. Your fingers look good on me, huge, clumsy. I did bruise and I missed it in the dark. You can’t get the collar high enough to hide it.  
  
“Something like Anderson, or Addison, or Anders. Andrews? No. Not Andrews--” I say, impatient, leg jittering. I feel flooded with discontentment at the awareness that I am impaired. “Andreski. Right? He’s Polish or something. Something Eastern European. Yes, that’s it, Sergeant Andreski, of--” I stop speaking. Your hands are on either side of my face, cupping my cheekbones, and my sleekly shaved cheeks. As young as young could be. All of his victims were younger that twenty-nine. One was only nineteen.  
  
“Holden, it’s okay. Please, calm down. I’m gonna get you to hospital and--”  
  
I shove my way through your attempt to trap me, though your big palms, onto you. And I’m on top of your thighs, my kneecap wedged into the sticky vinyl of the bench seat, my hands scrunching at your shirt. Uninhibited. That’s one of the symptoms of the sodium oxybate, and it’s a good symptom, because I’ve wanted to do this many times. And I haven’t done it until now and it feels great.  
  
I try to get my tongue in your mouth but it won’t fit and you’re making unpleasant sounds.  
  
You grab at me too. Only to shove me away. My skull cracks into contact with the passenger side window behind me as I sprawl back across the seat. Hurts. Not much. Dull like it’s through the exasperatingly thick fabric of jeans. You’re not wearing jeans. If I touched you I could feel it.  
  
“Holden.”  
  
“My name is Freddie. Freddie Lynch. I was born in 1950 in Southern California, where I studied--”  
  
“I told you. I told you, I fucking told you, you didn’t need a fucking backstory to act like a whore. Pull yourself together.”  
  
You’re trying to injure me. It won’t work. I’m absorbing nothing from you save the pleasure of your wrath. I’m still hard and I want you to hit me or kill me or mostly kill me. So I’m as know-it-all as I know how to be. “Backstory is crucial to undercover wo--”  
  
You don’t hit me. You lean back as if my head has spun one hundred eighty degrees and I’m issuing black goo from my mouth. “What the fuck was that, Holden?” you say, less angry, more fearful.  
  
I hope you like the way I look when I’m smiling up at you. I hope it makes you want to fuck me. Or wring my neck. “Nobody saw, Bill.”  
  
“Holden.” Again, my name, like it means anything to either of us. “Holden, we’re going to--”  
  
“You have fifteen bucks, right? You can afford me,” I say and I sidle in. Bit by bit. Creeping, crawling my way across the seat. And this time you don’t stop me. I have my hand on the thin of your suit and I can feel you shaking underneath. And then up to your thigh, kneading into ungiving muscle with my fingers that are shaking too.  
  
I pull your fly down, the loudest sound I’ve heard in my twenty-nine long years, and then I pull your briefs away and you say “not here” so low and sharp that I think you’re Bernie for a moment. He looked like you, in the same way that men who are men look like men. And men who are boys look like me. You push me, again, further onto the passenger side seat, and I let you. You tuck away your erection. Big. Bigger than me. Like everything about you. I loll back, and I stare up dreamily at you, and you look back and then away. It’s only a couple of hundred feet, the engine barely waking from slumber. You park the car and still don’t look over.  
  
“Holden, I’m worried about you,” you say, frigid with hurt.  
  
Out of nowhere, I’m guilty. “Shhh shhhh,” I say, sliding close, and then, “easy, easy, easy,” and I have your cock in my palm through your briefs. It’s soft but not quite flaccid. I kiss you again and you let me this time. I work across your mouth and then to a knotted jaw hinge.  
  
You groan, the same groan as if I’ve said something inappropriate at a crime scene. But your cock is hard again.  
  
I kiss you on the neck, with no intent to bruise. I try to go back to your lips. You don’t let me kiss you on the mouth.  
  
“Fifteen bucks, right?” you say, suddenly unfeeling. You grab me by the back of the neck, shove me down.  
  
My mouth hits your cock. I don’t know how to do this and it’s going to show.  
  
“You fucking-- _ah_ \-- you sick piece of shit,” you say, at the first touch of my lips.  
  
My mouth is filled with beer. Have I eaten today? I’ve been so excited I don’t think I’ve eaten. I’ve got beer in my mouth that was in my stomach. It tastes worse for it. I swallow it again and it burns on the way down. I don’t want to put my mouth on you. Not that mouth, not after what it’s done. I would make Bill Tench worse, and I don’t think I want to.  
  
And then I feel your fingers in my hair, combing to break the hairspray hold. Acquainting yourself with me. Smoothing it back to Holden Ford’s hair. Remodeling me back to what I was before this night.  
  
“I’m sorry, Bill,” I say, against your hard cock, the consonants in your name popping with saliva.  
  
You let me go. “It’s okay, Holden. You don’t have to do this, I was-- I wasn’t--” you’re babbling like water out of the ground at an inexplicable desert spring. I open my mouth, my teeth pried apart like a sprung trap, and I press the length of my tongue against the underside of your cock. It tastes not quite like skin. It doesn’t taste like any part of Debbie, not even her insides.  
  
You groan again but you don’t sound pained.  
  
“I haven’t done this before,” I tell you, Special Agent Bill Tench, about the blow job I intend to perform. Special Agent Bill Tench of the BSU. An important, sensible man. Towering over me, scruffy and bleared with arousal.  
  
“I bet you tell all the clients that,” you say, scraping like a slow motion trainwreck.  
  
And it clicks. “Money first.” I’m mostly over the bench seat, now, back arched inwards, face down low. Sordid, for you.  
  
You lick the corner of your mouth, and dig around in your back pocket for your wallet, hips pushing upright. Your erection nudges my cheek and imparts a stuttered smear. Like a hesitation mark. “Where’d you want the cash,” you perform for me.  
  
“Tuck it in my jeans for me. Back pocket. ...what’s your name?”  
  
You cast around and comes up worse than empty. “Benny.” Your fingers press the folded cash inside the pocket, and then drift over the rough fabric that should be my dress slacks. Afraid of full touch. But if it were Holden Ford in his suit, you’d be even more afraid to touch. If you were Bill Tench.  
  
“Benny. I like that name,” I say before I kiss your clothed thigh.


End file.
